For lots of people, the campaign is the least important part of a Call of Duty release, but it's the aspect of Black Ops II that Treyarch has spent the most (and the most obvious) time on. Despite all the attention, however, the results are a seriously mixed bag.

What works, at least in theory, is the new branching story concept. Taking to heart the long-leveled complaint that Call of Duty games tend toward the oppressively linear, the developers have integrated a choice system reminiscent of the one used in Mass Effect 3, which introduces tweaks as you go. Sometimes your decisions are small, sometimes they're large, and sometimes they're out of your control (finish a mission too late, for example, and you might miss out on a noteworthy event that has big repercussions later). But they have a tangible impact on the finale and the chapters leading up to it, where you'll pay the price or reap the dividends for what you've done or not done along the way. Don't like something you did? You can "rewind" your game to an earlier point and play from then on to see whether behaving differently will make things better or worse down the line. This is an intriguing, well-thought-out system that, frankly, we consider more satisfyingly rendered here than in Mass Effect 3.

The problem is what it's in service of. There are lots of connections to the original Black Ops in terms of characters and narrative elements, but that game's absorbing atmosphere of helplessness has been replaced by something overly plotty and far too manipulative. Switching between the Cold War–ravaged 1980s and 2025, the story attempts to reconcile the quest of David Mason to discover the truth about his father, Alex (the preceding game's protagonist), and save the civilized world from an apparent dictator on the rise named Raul Menendez, whose Cordis Die organization is rioting the world over.

Unfortunately, the game spends so much time trying to humanize Menendez that his eventual brutal acts make the story look positively schizophrenic. Not that it needs much help. The constant flipping between the decades makes consistency challenging and staying engaged with it even more difficult; the wide swath of characters you play (including, at one point, Menendez himself) dilutes any potential emotional impact from the history-spanning events the game documents (which include, among other things, an African civil war and an interlude with Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega); and stabs at topicality feel more strained than organic (Colonel Oliver North voices a cameo role as himself, the future president sounds just like Sarah Palin, and, in a sad bit of bad timing David Petraeus is a secretary in her administration).

Game play is similarly uneven. There are a couple of legitimately heart-pounding sequences, such as a thrilling high-speed chase through the burning streets of Pakistan, or when Los Angeles becomes a major flashpoint for violence late in the game. But some attempts are incongruous or eye-rolling. For example, David assumes control of a fighter jet—for the first time ever, no less—to escort an ambulance and shoot down attacking drones. Additionally, many of the straight-up fire-fight scenes are unremarkable in their construction, and frustrating in their execution and placement of autosave checkpoints. Various sci-fi elements that creep in, such as high-tech jetpacks and personal cloaking devices, may theoretically be appropriate to the 2025 scenes, but feel clumsily implemented. And the addition of more strategy-heavy Strike Force missions, in which you control various platoons on a series of missions by way of a third-person console (with first-person extensions), are hampered by restricted control schemes and a sense of repetitiveness that borders on desperation. (These are technically optional, but there's no way to get the "best" ending without playing through them all.)

The first Black Ops' campaign was more or less a conventional shooter that distinguished itself through its creepy (and unpredictable) psychological-thriller story, set against a believable backdrop of real-world events. There's no reason this one had to depart in so many unfocused directions; the flights of fancy it takes are never captivating.

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Matthew Murray got his humble start leading a technology-sensitive life in elementary school, where he struggled to satisfy his ravenous hunger for computers, computer games, and writing book reports in Integer BASIC. He earned his B.A. in Dramatic Writing at Western Washington University, where he also minored in Web design and German. He has been building computers for himself and others for more than 20 years, and he spent several years working in IT and helpdesk capacities before escaping into the far more exciting world...
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